


Found Family First

by 50FtQueenie



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dad Jokes, Implied Sexual Content, Mental Health Issues, Multi, The People's Tomb Fic Jam (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26856523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/50FtQueenie/pseuds/50FtQueenie
Summary: The Fourth and Fifth Houses prepare to depart for the Lyctor Trials.
Relationships: Abigail Pent/Magnus Quinn
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	Found Family First

Baron Isaac Tettares evaluated his outfit in the full-length mirror fixed to the door of his bedroom. Brilliant orange faux-hawk coiffed and spiked. Check. Light blue sateen shirt with a bias-cut placket and band collar. Check. Slim-fit, white suede trousers. Done. Blue leather Chelsea boots. Sorted. Brilliant, sparkling, blue necromancer’s robes slung roguishly across chest and one shoulder. Complete. It was an edgy look, fitting for a Fourth House Scion. But when he looked at his reflection, all he saw was a scared little boy playing dress up.

He cast his eyes downward and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. How would he ever survive the going-away ball tonight, let alone the Lyctor Trials scheduled to begin tomorrow? The Necrolord Prime had called for someone who might become a Necrosaint, not for a panic-stricken boy not yet grown into the fullness of his power. He sighed deeply, shoulders slumping as all the puff left his slim chest. Bile rose in his gullet and he pushed it back down in one massive gulp. 

Isaac experienced almost everything somatically. His body was like an exquisite tuning fork that resonated in the frequency of necromantic signs, external social cues, and even his own tumultuous internal states. While it was normal for necromancers to experience their magic through the conduit of their imperfect bodies, Isaac’s unruly corpus took things to an extreme. Other necromancers got nose bleeds with intense effort. In the height of his exertions, Isaac sometimes vomited or coughed up gobs of clotted blood. Necromancy aside, he sweated and twitched, vibrated and churned through the quotidian indecencies of everyday living.

It had gotten worse as his body began to change at the onset of adolescence. Sometimes he thought he might actually die, or at least pass out. Sometimes he did pass out. Other times, he wanted nothing more than to cast off his body like a discarded robe or to discorporate into a fine mist. As puberty set in, he experienced increasing difficulties in discerning the source of the forces that tormented his flesh at any given moment. Was it an angry spirit? A powerful draw of thanergetic power? The thalergy of an opening flower? Perhaps it was lingering resonances from a recent battle of words between a feuding couple. It could also just be his own accursed emotions, which he tried with limited success to lock up tight inside himself. If he could not control anything else, at least he could try to present a stoic façade for his siblings and house. The Fourth was a difficult place to be a necromantic teen Scion overfilled with feelings.

When he turned thirteen, he wondered if perhaps he had developed a bad case of acid reflux and some neurological malady. His heart sank when he the doctor gave him a clean bill of health. A medical ailment could be treated. But what was one to do with ailments rooted in the heart, psyche, and magician’s sensorium? On the zealous Fourth, it seemed like an insurmountable problem. He dare not mention it lest a note be put in his file that might ruin his future in the Cohort.

The most uncomfortable incident in recent memory had happened at a state dinner last year on the Fourth. A very pretty boy visiting from the Fifth—perhaps a year older than him—had smiled and attempted to engage him in ever-so-slightly flirtatious conversation. Isaac had been totally undone from his buzzing scalp to the tingling palms of his hands and soles of his feet. He had not immediately understand why, and not a word escaped in response from his hopelessly clenched jaw. Or rather, the words jostled about inside of his stomach, bouncing one off the other in the fight to determine which might erupt. A thick stopper knot settled in his throat, stuffing them all back down into his churning guts until Jeanne kicked him hard under the table. He had managed to stammer something that seemed, in retrospect, to be very stupid. Then, he excused himself and beat a hasty retreat to the washroom. In the mirror, he assessed the growing sweat stains that enveloped his carefully curated outfit from neck to toes, dark stains spreading like a Rorschach inkblot. Reading that pattern, he slowly realized the source of his discomfort and blushed, the budding attraction moving from the depths of his belly to the forefront of his mind. Thank the Necrolord Prime, he thought, for the flowing adept’s robes that could hide his now saturated clothing.

Later that night, when he could not stop the awful scene from replaying itself in an endless loop in his head, Jeanne had pulled him into a fierce hug as tight as a vise. She growled words of support in his ear, telling him that he had been fabulous. The slightly older cav was always watching over her anxious mess of a necromancer like that, reassuring him while trying to coax out his confidence. And he, the cautious and careful one, tended to the matchbox of her temper, bringing her back to reason whenever she seemed primed to spontaneously combust. They were virtually inseparable now, each a flawed component part of what seemed to them to be a perfect ensemble.

Over the past three months living on the Fifth, Isaac had worked up the courage to tell Abigail about his unruly body and the difficulties he found in discerning which signs came from outside and which from within himself. He and Jeanne had made long training visits to the Pent household before. Ever since they were first paired they would go to the Fifth from time to time—a week or two here, a month there—and take up residence with Abigail and Magnus, studying under their careful watch. But this was the longest they had stayed, and Isaac was growing much more comfortable with the accomplished Fifth Scion, who would be intimidating to any child and most adults. When he told her about his problem, Abigail assured him that this was a side effect of his prodigious, but not-yet-fully-realized potential as a spirit magician. With hard work, it could be managed and channeled to his advantage. Together, they worked on meditations and mental exercises to help him sense the causes of his somatic sensations. 

It had all been going fairly well, he thought, until tonight. He could not stop thinking about the impending trip to the First and feeling in his stomach that something was out of place. He paced back and forth in the small room, but it failed to salve his worry. Crestfallen, he marched across the hallway and entered Jeannemary’s quarters unannounced. His cav was arranging the sets of earrings—small, blue steel spikes—that marched up the outer edge of her left ear. She was wearing shimmering, cerulean high-waisted trousers with shiny, black, knee-high boots and a bright white, puff-sleeved silken blouse. Well-tended appearances aside, her curly dark hair limned her head in a way that belied an inner fierceness.

“You look pretty,” the boy said. “Of course I do!” the cav replied in the self-assured she tones she often used with him in private. “Come plait my hair,” she commanded. The younger boy gladly obliged since it was something productive to do with his purposeless hands and twitchy fingers. And anyway, he was very good at hair. “Isaaaaaaac,” she chided *sotto voce*, “what’s wrong? You’re sweating on my head.” “I don’t feel well, Jeanne” came the tremulous response. “Come on, necro-Fourth! We’re going to a party, not a funeral. I hear that Fifth boy we met last year might be there. Don’t you want to flirt with him?” He groaned in distress as his abdominal pain intensified. “It’s not the party, Jeanne. Or, not just that. It’s the Lyctor Trials. Something feels different. I’m ...” he gulped, “afraid.”

“Why should any Scion of the Fourth be afraid of those other houses?!” She came back. “I bet the Third House will be too busy gazing at their own reflections. And the Ninth… *Can you even imagine?* I bet their necro is, like a reanimated skeleton with a soul that doesn’t even know what it is and has noooo power. Or the necro is like, a talentless, scurvy-ridden child the color of skimmed milk, draped in old black curtains,” she scoffed. “The cav is probably just a huuuuuuge, stupid suitcase made out of human skin. Empty inside and only useful for what they can carry—which, by the way, is definitely not a sword. I mean who knows if anyone is even left on the Ninth. Only the Lord Undying knows how they get children there.”

He laughed even though she had entirely misapprehended the source of his fear, and asked quietly, “You know how they make babies on the Ninth, Jeannemary?” He paused for comedic effect. “They bone.” They both laughed now, momentarily unburdened by the worries of the world. Jeanne made a gagging noise and said, “Isaaaaac. Ug. You’ve been spending too much time with Magnus. His dad jokes must be contagious!! Maybe that’s why you feel ill.”

He finished plaiting her hair and she commanded, “Come here and let me do your makeup. I want to do smoky, blue eyes this time.” He sat down as she brushed and drew and flurried inks and powders and glitters across his face. They chattered aimlessly about crushes, music, and nothing in particular. For a brief moment in Jeannemary’s care, the boy necromancer felt like maybe everything would be alright.

*****

Abigail Pent sat at the makeup table in her bedroom chambers, gazing into the large, oval mirror. One brown lock of her hair, scintillating with just a few strands of silver, kept popping out of the golden clip pinning it up. She looked beautiful and stately even under her own critical gaze. She also looked acutely worried. The set of her mouth alerted Magnus to her unease as he tucked his crisp linen shirt into brown woolen jodhpurs and hastily donned a matching redingote. He walked over behind her, and rested large, lightly-calloused hands on her shoulders.

The cavalier smiled at her in the mirror. When Magnus turned his full attention on someone, he could make them feel like the most important person in the world. And Abigail was, in truth, the most important person in his world. His face was touched by fine lineaments won not through age, but through relentless mirth. As he smiled at her, joy danced in his eyes, causing the corners to scrunch up into deep crow’s feet. She could not fathom life without him.

Once, when they were young, she had tried very hard to make him go away. Marriage to the necromantic Scion of the Fifth would be a burden to anyone—state functions, administrative work, a life of living in the shadow of Abigail and her overweighted responsibilities. Magnus was smart, handsome, and, more than anything else, kind. She had never met anyone so good at the core. She had hoped that breaking up would afford him a chance to realize his own dreams, rather than throwing everything away for hers. She had remembered her own mothers’ struggles with the burdens of rule—the grey days when her one mother looked wan and burdened, somehow diminished in her own identity as a scholar by the demands of being the spouse of the Scion.

Yet, truth be told, Abigail’s attempts to escape Magnus’ orbit were not all altruistic. Part of her wondered what the excitement of a more dangerous liaison would feel like. For all his considerable charms, Magnus sometimes felt too safe—too much like a soft, warm blanket. Would a partner with sharper edges spur her to greatness? Or perhaps it would be better for a woman of her station and talents to take no long-term partner at all.

At 17, she pushed him away—hard. She was callous, cruel even. She ignored most of his letters. When she did write back, she found ways to carefully fold poisonous barbs within bland pablum. She took other lovers—an irreverent daughter on the Eighth, a rakish mathematician on the Sixth, a brilliant Laird on the Third who claimed no fixed gender and celebrated all—and made sure the gossip would carry all the way to Magnus’s family home on Rhax. She found endless banal but biting ways to be mean to him. And she sometimes enjoyed the sport of it. She conducted the exercise like an experiment: How far could she push Magnus Quinn before he would break away?

Improbably, the man had hung on. No matter what she did, she could not seem to sever the invisible threads binding him to her. He was no simpering fool, though. He had always maintained his independence and dignity. Once, he tried to gain a commission in the Cohort before her overly sentimental, head-of-house mother rejected his deployment. Although he led his own life apart from her, he never failed to periodically send subtle soundings to locate her and judge her distance. Occasionally, when she was not travelling, he visited. The man seemed to float no matter what emotional projectiles she lobbed at him.

Yet even as Abigail drew some satisfaction from pushing Magnus away, she was also forced to admit that she missed him terribly. Life without him had increasingly seemed like dwelling at the bottom of a deep, dark well. To be sure, she had her personal entanglements and necromantic studies. Above all, she had her scholarship. Talking to the dead consumed her, both in her pursuit of spirit magic and in her research. History was just another way of communing with the departed—one which she was quite good at. But without Magnus, her life seemed oversaturated with sepia tones. She kept up appearances as a melancholia had rolled in as thick as fog and threatened to overwhelm her. Magnus had been a bright light and a beacon, she realized belatedly. How could a scholar read without illumination?

On one of her visits back home to the Fifth, Magnus had come to see her. This time, she could not resist him—his bouncing, boyish brown curls, his smiling eyes, his broad shoulders, the scent and feel of him. She took him back that day, and had remained with him ever since. Once she accepted that Magnus wanted to live a life in support of her more than anything else in the universe, she agreed to marry him. He became her help-mete and handmaiden, cook and carer, seneschal and porter. He did not weigh her down; He lifted her to new heights of achievement. Five years ago, despite the opprobrium it had earned them both, he also became her cavalier primary. “One flesh, one end” entangled with “let us travel twain in this life and wend our way unparted through the river beyond”—the Fifth House marriage vows.

Now, as she looked back at his reflection in the mirror, she could not repress a small smile, even though she still felt disquieted. “What is it, Love?” he asked. “Oh Magnus… it’s just… I have a bad feeling. Something seems…. not right. Since we received the invitation to the Lyctor Trials, I can’t shake the sense that it’s all wrong somehow.” He paused for a moment, appearing to think. “Is this spirit-sense, or the leftover cake you ate for breakfast?” he japed, seeking to lighten the mood.

“Pfaw! Magnus Quinn! I’m being serious!” she said crossly. “It’s just, something . . . feels… wrong to me.” She bit her bottom lip slightly. “I cannot place it. I’m already convinced that something is wrong with the river,” she said, gesturing in the direction of her study, where piles of notes waited for collation into a manuscript. “And now, of all times, the Necrolord Prime looks up from his endless wars to call a Lyctorhood Trial? Something doesn’t fit and I can just feel the twistedness of it at my core.” She paused for a moment, briefly looking down at her hands, and continued, quieter now. “Did you ever think, Magnus, about the Saints to the Lord Undying—how sixteen men and women went to Canaan in matched pairs, but only eight ascended? I know my history. What happened to the other eight?” He had no easy answer. “And I’m worried most about the children…” she trailed off.

“Abigail, you can’t hold onto them forever. You’ll smother them,” Magnus said. “That was a fine stunt you pulled the last time you kept them out of the Cohort,” he added. “But you can’t keep them from living their lives. And they are of the *Fourth* house after all. These past three months, I’ve worked with Jeanne more than ever before and you with Isaac. And, light, Jeanne is growing into a fine swordswoman. She’ll match many a cav from the other houses if she just keeps her composure. I bet she’d best that overweaning dandy from the Third! A Chatur original.” He paused before saying solemnly, “We have prepared them as best we can for whatever they might face. And we’ll be there with them at Canaan. Whatever we four encounter, we will face it together.” “Besides,” he added as an afterthought. “This will be an adventure! First House! Lyctorhood… *a myriad’s worth* of dirty old papers just waiting for your longing eyes and tender caresses. What more could my brilliant wife want from a vacation?”

She met his eyes steadily in reflection. “Promise me, Magnus… you have to promise me that we’ll keep the children safe.” It was a command, not a plea, issued from Scion to subject, adept to cavalier, wife to husband. “I promise,” he said earnestly, eyes softening. “Now, face forward. You’ll ruin your hair if you keep worrying that one lock. Here, let me.”

He delicately re-pinned her hair, kissed the top of her head, and moved his hands back to her shoulders. She smiled at him fully then in the mirror, the very nearly imperceptible lines at the corners of her eyes now bunching into faint wrinkles of happiness that echoed his own. She reached up to her right shoulder, resting her small hand on his. He was the best person she had ever known. She rose, smoothed the front of her brown brocade gown, and led him out of their rooms and into the hallway.

*****

As Magnus and Abigail walked down the grand staircase, they saw Isaac and Jeanne waiting for them, hand-in-hand in the foyer. The two adults strode forward, taking their places next to the teens. Abigail looked at Isaac, flashing a diffident smile meant solely for the nervous boy who momentarily seemed to her to be as small and young as the day of their first meeting so many years ago. She took his sweaty free right hand in her left and gave it a small squeeze, linking the four in an unbroken chain of clasped hands, Fourth and Fifth necromancers bookended by their cavaliers primary.

Perhaps together this improbable little household—bound together not by blood, but by care—might emerge victorious from the trials to come. Magnus broke the silence. “Well! Here we are.” His voice hitched in his throat for an almost imperceptible fraction of a second. “Found family.” He paused briefly to let those words sink in. “Tonight, the ball. Tomorrow, the First.”


End file.
